Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

Welcome to Marius Peelen's Visual Cognitive Neuroscience lab

We use fMRI, M/EEG, TMS, eye tracking, and psychophysics to study visual perception and attention in humans.

We are based at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

The lab is primarily funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant aimed at characterizing the neural mechanisms underlying the efficiency of goal-directed naturalistic human vision.

Read more about our other projects here.

Lab news:

  • 02/23: Welcome to Aaron (MSc intern) and Natalia (visiting PhD student)!

  • 01/23: New paper on the boundary extension illusion published in Psychological Science.

  • 12/22: Can neuroimaging data be used to test cognitive theories? Read our take on this in this preprint.

  • 12/22: How does knowledge affect the perception of body postures? See our recent results in this preprint.

  • 11/22: Giacomo completes his PhD by submitting an impressive thesis, starting the next day with a postdoc in Amsterdam.

  • 11/22: Congratulations to Sushrut for a very convincing PhD defense.

  • 10/22: Check out our new preprint on how expected distractor context biases the attentional template.

  • 09/22: Paper out in Journal of Vision: Statistical learning of distractor co-occurrences facilitates visual search

  • 09/22: All the best to Chuanji Gao, who will return to China to start his own group after a fun and productive time with us

  • 09/22: Welcome to Eelke Spaak, who will be affiliated with the lab while he builds his own group.

  • 08/22: Paper out in JEP:HPP: The time course of categorical and perceptual similarity effects in visual search. (preprint)

  • 07/22: Congratulations to Jochem for completing his MSc internship and thesis (Cum Laude)!

  • 07/22: Welcome back to Lu-Chun, who joins us as a postdoc after finishing her PhD in Taiwan

  • 06/22: New paper investigating the time course of categorical and perceptual similarity effects in visual search. Soon to appear in JEP:HPP.

  • 05/22: Welcome to Susan, who will do a remote internship with us from India

  • 04/22: Paper out in NeuroImage: Body shape as a visual feature: Evidence from spatially-global attentional modulation in human visual cortex

  • 04/22: Preprint showing that learned co-occurrence statistics between distractors increases search efficiency

  • 03/22: Congratulations to Giacomo for winning a Donders poster award!

  • 02/22: New paper in JEP:G: "Affective valence of words differentially affects visual and auditory word recognition". Preprint here.

  • 02/22: First experiment started in the muZIEum! We will measure inattentional blindness for a range of objects. See here for background.

  • 01/22: Marius starts as speaker of Donders Institute Theme 2 (Perception, Action and Decision-making).

  • 12/21: New paper in Current Biology: "Preparatory attention incorporates contextual expectations"

  • 11/21: Preprint demonstrating spatially-global feature based attention for human bodies

  • 11/21: Preprint showing that boundary extension is strongest for scene photos with naturalistic (shallow) depth of field.

  • 10/21: Congratulations to Genevieve for obtaining a fellowship at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development!

  • 10/21: Paper accepted in Psychological Science: Scene context impairs perception of semantically congruent objects.

  • 09/21: Welcome to Qiu Han, who joins us from China for a 4-year PhD position.

  • 08/21: Paper reporting causal neural mechanisms of context-based object recognition published in eLife, see here for a summary.

  • 08/21: Congratulations and best wishes to Surya who started as an assistant professor in Utrecht this month! Luckily, he will remain affiliated with the Peelenlab for the duration of his Veni grant.

  • 08/21: Preprint on the effect of valence on visual and auditory word recognition.

  • 06/21: Welcome to Mariska, who recently joined us as an RA

  • 04/21: New perspective paper in iScience about the importance of considering context in cognitive neuroscience research.

  • 03/21: Welcome to Martina, who will conduct her MSc internship research with us

  • 02/21: Congratulations to Marco for winning a Marie Curie Fellowship, allowing him to continue his research on memory-based perception in the lab.

  • 02/21: Welcome to Lu-Chun Yeh, who will spend a year with us to investigate semantic influences in visual search. She is a final-year PhD student at National Taiwan University.

  • 01/21: New visual detection paradigm reveals that face orientation can be processed unconsciously, but that category-based attention requires awareness; work that Timo Stein started during his postdoc and greatly expanded in the years afterwards.

  • 12/20: paper out in J Neurosci: "Causal evidence for a double dissociation between object- and scene-selective regions of visual cortex: A pre-registered TMS replication study"

  • 10/20: Welcome to Chuanji Gao (postdoc) and Maëlle Lerebourg (PhD student). Not an easy time to start a new position, but already full of ideas!

  • 09/20: Best of luck to Miles in his new postdoc position at the University of Minnesota!

  • 08/20: New paper in Cerebral Cortex, in which we use EEG to demonstrate that contextual and spatial associations between objects interactively influence object processing. Results reveal the neural timecourse of multi-object grouping based on typical relative spatial position (e.g., lamp above table).

  • 06/20: Congratulations to Chuanji Gao for winning a Radboud Excellence Fellowship! Chuanji will join us in October.

  • 05/20: New PhD project on attention, funded by the DCC.

  • 03/20: Welcome to three new lab members: Marco Gandolfo (ERC postdoc), Simen Hagen (ERC postdoc), and Andrea Ghiani (Erasmus intern).

  • 02/20: Alexandra accepted into the UC Davis graduate school, working with Prof. John Henderson. Wonderful news!

  • 02/20: Congratulations to Myrthel on her new position as editor at Nature Communications.

  • 02/20: Welcome to Linlin Shang, starting her PhD in the lab.

  • 01/20: Register now for the Concepts, Actions, Objects workshop (Rovereto, Italy, 7-9 May 2020)!

  • 12/19: Marius appointed Associate Editor at The Journal of Neuroscience

  • 10/19: Daniel Kaiser, Stefania Bracci, and Reshanne Reeder (former PhD students ) all obtained faculty positions - congrats!

  • 09/19: New paper in eLife, investigating the nature of the animacy organization in the ventral stream.

  • 08/19: Marius joins the eLife editorial board

  • 08/19: We are hiring! See opportunities

  • 08/19: Come find us at ECVP where we will present lots of new work.

  • 07/19: Surya receives Veni grant to fund another 3 years of research - top!

  • 06/19: New paper in Cerebral Cortex: Auditory and Semantic Cues Facilitate Decoding of Visual Object Category in MEG. pdf

  • 05/19: Myrthel Dogge joins the lab as researcher on Surya's NWO replication grant - welcome!

  • 05/19: Workshop on Concepts, Actions, and Objects in Rovereto. link

  • 05/19: New review paper in TiCS: Object Vision in a Structured World. pdf

  • 04/19: Yuan-Fang Zhao joins the lab as an ERC postdoc - welcome!

  • 03/19: New paper in NeuroImage: MEG sensor patterns reflect perceptual but not categorical similarity of animate and inanimate objects. pdf

  • 02/19: New commentary in Emotion: The danger of interpreting detection differences between image categories. pdf

  • 02/19: Genevieve obtains Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship to continue her research in the Peelen lab - congratulations!

  • 02/19: Miles Wischnewski joins the lab as an ERC postdoc - welcome!